Sagrada Familia

There is a suitably Advent theme about the latest news from the long-running construction of Antonio Gaudi’s church of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. This has now reached another milestone with the completion of the 452 foot high spire over the eastern end of the building. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary it is topped by an illuminated star of Bethlehem. This was lit for the first time on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Sagrada Familia was begun in 1882, and until his tragic death in 1926 was the principal project of Gaudi’s, a man of great personal piety and himself now a candidate for elevation to the altar as a beatus or saint. The history and design of the church is set out in Sagrada Família

This stage in the building is recorded in a piece on the Mail Online website and it includes pictures of the rest of this extraordinary church at The Mail gets a sneak peek at the new Sagrada Familia tower

It was hoped to complete Sagrada Familia in 2026, but the consequences of the pandemic appear to have delayed that. Nonetheless it does seem that in a few years this remarkable building will finally be completed. When that is so the central spire at 564 feet will outreach the 530 feet of that at the west end iof Ulm Minster, completed in 1890 and adding ten feet to the medieval plans. The story of the great church in Ulm can be read at Ulm Minster

I will add here the comment that although the claimed height of 584 feet for the fourteenth century timber and lead spire on the central tower of Lincoln cathedral which blew down in 1548 is now thought to be an exaggeration and not physically possible it is still thought to have been in the region of at least 525 feet tall, and to have been the tallest building in the world erected before the 1848 Washington Monument. No mean achievement for the early fourteenth century. By comparison the spire of Salisbury cathedral, also from the fourteenth century but in stone, is 404 feet high.

I only know Sagrada Familia from photographs and one can admire its exuberant and fantastic qualities without necessarily liking all of it or even all of its parts - and it is a building of many and complex parts. That is not to say I actually dislike it or that I fail to appreciate Gaudi’s vision of a stone forest stretching up from the earth in its yearning for God. It is a spectacular counterblast to secularism, indifferentism, atheism and the modern world. It is a strange irony of history that it is in a city which witnessed such horrors from the enemies of the Church in the late 1930s.

This is mysticism made material - or the material made mystical. Few, if any, ecclesiastical buildings of the past century snd a half do that, and none so spectacularly as Sagrada Familia. However I suppose the question lurking in my mind is on the lines of would I want to always go there for Mass? On this feast of that great Spanish mystic St John of the Cross this seems a thought to pose about mysticism - one can revere its fruits, one can admire its practitioners, but how comfortable with it do we more ordinary mortals feel?